We are excited about the availability of Office 365 Advanced eDiscovery—further strengthening the rich set of eDiscovery capabilities already present in Office 365—to help you quickly investigate and meet legal obligations.

Office 365 Advanced eDiscovery integrates Equivio machine learning, predictive coding and text analytics capabilities to reduce the costs and challenges that come along with sorting through large quantities of data for eDiscovery purposes.

In today’s high volume data environment, the eDiscovery process for any given case could involve sorting through thousands of emails, text messages, instant messages and documents to find the small number of files that are most likely to be relevant.

Office 365 Advanced eDiscovery reduces the volume of data by eliminating duplicate files, reconstructing email threads and identifying key themes and data relationships. Finally, it enables predictive coding, allowing users to train the system to intelligently explore and analyze large, unstructured data sets and quickly zero in on what is likely to be relevant.

Predictive coding

In eDiscovery, there’s a lot of data that’s just not relevant to a case. Predictive coding enables you to train the system to automatically distinguish between relevant and non-relevant documents by making decisions on a small set of data. The system will then use this learning to make decisions on relevancy across all of the documents. Advanced eDiscovery provides a relevance ranking, so you can decide which documents to review based on the percentage of documents that are most likely to be relevant to your case.

Near-duplicate detection

When dealing with thousands of documents, some will be the same or have content that’s similar to other documents. During the document review process, reviewers must read each of these documents, and the costs can quickly add up. If you have five people reviewing documents, each person could review five different versions of the same document, wasting valuable time and money looking at the same information. With near-duplicate detection, you can structure your review so one person reviews a group of similar documents, making it far more efficient.

Email threading

When a user sends an email and another person replies, an email thread starts. The second email has all of the information from the first email, so there is no reason to review both messages (unless something was changed between them). Email threading identifies the unique messages in an email thread, so you can focus only on the unique information.

Themes

Themes aid with investigations by grouping related documents, so you can look at the documents in context. Themes allow you to view the related themes for a set of documents and determine how much overlap there is and identify cross sections of related data. For example, one theme might be agreements and contracts, an overlapping theme might be a company called Contoso. With this information you can discover and drill down to see the contracts and agreements involving Contoso.

Export for review applications

With Advanced eDiscovery, when you export the data from Office 365, it’s packaged with a CSV file that contains the document properties and analytics metadata. Once exported you can load this CSV file into eDiscovery review applications and maintain the analytics information.

Next, you can create searches in an eDiscovery case and then select the option to Analyze with Equivio.

After the data is prepared, you can use the Equivio analytics capabilities integrated with Office 365 Advanced eDiscovery.

Get started with Advanced eDiscovery today

Office 365 Advanced eDiscovery is part of the new Office 365 E5 plan. The integrated Equivio capabilities, as part of Advanced eDiscovery, can be accessed from the Office 365 Compliance Center eDiscovery section.